Ruln

One way to improve the economy is to get more people playing. I'd suggest that destroying expensive items on a regular basis (While in addition charging gold for the privilige of this experience and giving no refunds upon failure) is not the best way to build the community, and thus improve the economy. At least some of the efforts to balance the economy in EL seem heavy handed and arbitrary to me. This is one of them. You saved the guys daughter, why would he charge you for a service he fails at regularly and not at least refund your money? It seems to me that the way to solve a lot of the economic problems is to significantly increase both the time that items take and the number of exps you get from them. If you are going to increase the time then I'd make manu more like reading books. IE, you can do other things while you are making something. So that Plate armor might take 24 hours to make and give out a ton of exps. This keeps the number of items way down and allows people to advance at a reasonable rate.

One thing I worry about is that there seems to be a lot of stuff in EL that is simply accepted as being so. I'd hope that any decisions this group made would be based both upon experience and good logical arguments.

I don't doubt that, and don't have a problem with it. I'm just suggesting that having a more flexibile limit generating algorythm at higher levels would potentially make the game a bit more fair/fun. Right now I'm spending pretty much all my time sitting and harvesting. I feel like I have to if I am going to continue to advance. If I let one lousy harvest hour go by without getting my full compliment of harvest exps it seems like I am screwing myself. Is this my hangup? Yes, but I have to wonder if I'm alone in that.

I'm curious, how many of those levels if any did you gain before the limit was put into place? The answer may very well be none, but I'm new enough not to know when this change was made. To go from level 72 to 73 is around 550k exps. At a max of around 6k per hour that is nearly one hundred hours of harvesting. At 4 hours of playing a day that is the better part of a month. As time goes buy the top ten in Harvest is going to start to lague seriously over the top ten in some of the other skills. Skills other then harvest have the following difficulty curve. x x x x xx xxx xxxx It varies a bit from skil to skill of course. Harvest is more like this... x x x x xx xxx xxxx xxxxx Easier at the begining, but much harder latter on. Ideally all skills should be roughly equal in difficulty and benifit gained per level. I'd tend to think tweaking EXP's for the various skills would be a good idea in conjunction with making the govenor on harvest a bit more flexible.

The point is if you leave it tied to defense you are requiring that every player spend a bunch of their time fighting to increase their levels to the point where they can actually practice their chosen profession. Thus turning EL into primarily a hack fest. You have yet to address this little problem. And I'll say it one more time (And for the last time, I think this has gone on long enough). Removing MM does little or nothing to hurt fighters while totally screwing everyone else. Doesn't make sense. Causes more problems then it solves. Doesn't really solve much of anything from what I can tell as bag jumpers predate MM and would postdate its removal if that were to occur. Removing MM by itself would not improve the game. You would have to do other things in conjunction. Having monster ignore tied to OA or Harvest is one possible solution.

From reading it sounds to me like there are two major problems here. One, a few trouble makers who have to grandstand constantly and can't keep their issues private. Two, the forums are taking up too much time and effort by the people in charge who would much rather be doing something else. I get the imression that int he past others took on the brunt of handling the forums. It seems to me that one answer is for somebody to step up to the plate, start an unofficial forum and minimize the amount of effort the central people in EL have to make in order for that forum/community to function. I've run forums and been a moderator before. It is often a thankless job because to many people are overly obsessed with getting their way and lack clue one as to how much effort goes into the job. They make it stressful and very unfun.

All the skills have the same exp chart from what I can tell. No other skill has a per hour limit so far as I know. I believe Diamonds are the highest exp items and they give 52 exps per harvest. (Assuming no other bonuses. Lets round that to 50 for simplicity. 120*50=6000 exp per hour max. I'm harvest 54. It takes ~175k to advance to level 55. Thats ~ 30 hours of harvesting. Lets say your average person plays a couple of hours a day. Thats two weeks. Even playing four hours a day will take a week, assuming you always harvest all the diamonds you can. Thats not aweful, but it only gets worse from there. There is no limit on the other skills. Harvest is easy exps up until around 50th level so it makes sense to have the 120 harvest per hour cap to encourage people to do other things. Once you get around level 50 though that flat 120 cap actually discourages you from doing other things since you have to be sure you get 100% of those harvest exps if you want to advance more then a couple of times a year. Which is why I'm suggesting the cap be a % of the level or some such after characters pass a threshold, say somewhere around level 50-60. I can see some holes in this but I think my basic objection is sound.

I wonder if this could be implamented as fractions of a level per hour once you reach around 50th level in harvest? Yes, there is self interest here but I'm getting near the point where even if I harvest diamonds constantly so long as I'm around it could take weeks to increase a single harvest level, maybe more. I understand why the 120 harvests per hour was put in place, but at some point it actually becomes more onerous as you can no longer move on to harvesting something with higher exp total and the level gain requiremnts continue to escalate.

Lets compromise. We'll tie the monster ignore feature to harvest level and eliminate mm. Sound good?

But that case hasn't been made. My suggestion, tie the monster ignore to OA level, not defense. Or better yet, tie it to harvest.

The phrase "You get what you pay for" came about for a reason... Is it fair that people pay for something special and then others who are unwilling or unable complain about it?

Potions don't require food, at least not the lower level ones. Meaning this would be a much greater benifit to the potion maker, right? Otherwise it seems like a reasonable idea to me. Most things take so much food to make that it wouldn't make much of a difference anyway and would reduce a tiny bit the chance of injury. And as somebody who has had tendonitas in both hands/writs and constantly skate on the edge of having it again I view this as a good thing.

One mans flaws are another mans means of making a living. The fundamental issue here is that fighters lose nothing if MM is removed. Everyone else is forced to spend far more time working on their combat skills. I don't see that as a benifit for anyone. Many of the spawns are way overhunted already. Hey, theres a downside for the fighter types, more competition for monster spawns. Explain to me how fighters lose by this. Thats my main issue. They gain, everyone else loses and the game essentially turns primarily into a hack fest. I'm not saying there aren't issues in this area. I am saying removing mm by itself causes as many problems or more then it solves.

Many of the recommended levels in the encyclopedia seem to be a bit on the optomistic side. From talking online to others who have been around longer it seems that there was some tweaking a couple of versions back to generally increase the difficulty of making stuff. Given that I'd like to see the levels in the encyclopedia adjusted to something more realistic. I don't mind so much the difficulty as I do the disconnect. The fact that I'm alch 26 and critically fail 25% of the time on matter ess (Ecyclopedia recommended level 10) is really annoying. If the recommended level were something more then half my level I'd be much less prone to mumbling nasty things under my breath when I fail.

Why do you think they are good? As I mentioned above I amd 2.6 times the recommended level for matter ess and critically fail 25% of the time. I fail well over half. Is this a new definition of good that I hadn't previously heard of? Or recommended for that matter. Sounds more like a "remotely possible" level to me. And note, this is a documentation issue, NOT a game mechanics issue.

Do you primarily fight or harvest/manu? In the big picture I see the removal of MM as having minimum impact on fighter types and major impact on harvest/manu types. I spent five PP's on MM. I don't see that as a free ride. Especially given how worthless it will be in a year or two when I reach def 100. I'm fine with that. I just see a disconnect here. I don't really care for the fighting aspect of the game. I do it on occasion, mostly as a change of pace. In your model I would have to devote a lot more of my time to building my def so that I could harvest the stuff I want to. I don't see this as a plus or a good way of enhancing the game. Increase the challlenge? Fine, but do it in the context of my chosen profession. There are a heck of a lot of books to read before you can harvest everything and some of them take a lot of time to "read". So without MM you would strip nakid other then a few pickaxes, sneak in and pray that when (Not if, unless you are very high level) you got killed you didn't drop what you were harvesting. You couldn't risk using the exc cloak or anything else of value unless you carried a Rastagol stone and those are far to rare to waste that way. I agree with you that removing MM would have a profound impact on the game. It just looks to me like most of that negative impact would fall on the harvest/manu/alch/crafting side of the fence unless there were substantial additional changes. This sounds more like a version 2.0 kind of thing to me.

Sure, it gets less useful as time goes on. Maybe there should be a pp rebate when you hit a certain def level? Don't most perks essentially get diluted as you advance though?

The tricky bit is, are you making teh game harder or tedious and boring? My problem as somebody who primarily harvests is that I could not practice my chosen profession in any meaningful way without also being a fighter type. I'm A/D 28/30 right now and harvest 53. If there was no MM perk then I'd likely have something a lot closer to parity on those three and be substantially lower in my chosen profession. What is the downside for fighters that matches my downside? The concept of some sort of god or other quest to gain MM is interesting. But that doesn't change what I perceive as a lack of balance issue. Now if all harvestables in the game are available in places where characters of say 21/21 A/D can get to them then my objection is moot. Of course that is a pretty fundamental (And non to positive) change to the game. I think MM should cost more. Something like eight to ten PP's given how useful it is.

I've seen a lot of debate in game over the merits and demerits of various positive and negative perks Positive perks cost pick points, negative perks give you pick points. In evaluating wether a particular perk is worth having I look at the cost and the benifit. In the case of the godless perk I am excluded from the god quests and thus can not gain the advantage of 20% extra experience in three seperate skills. (Limited of course by the fact that the three gods can not be enemies. The conventional wisdom seems to be that godless is great at lower levels but at higher levels it becomes more and more of a pain as that 20% experience boost is a huge factor in gaining skill levels. Thus a lot of people reset. Thats the downside as I understand it. Now for the upside. Eight PP's. What is that worth? Depends on where you spend them to some extent. First though I want to outline my understanding of PP's. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Total PP's = OA + 5 + negative perks I'm OA 55. I have "I can't dance" & "Godless" as negative peerks These add up to 13 pp's. 55+5+13=73 If I subtract the five starting PP's this means I have as many PP's as an OA 68 character. How many exps does it take to go from OA55 to OA68? OA55=2,514,027 OA68=6,058,407 Meaning these two negative perks have currently gained me ~3.5 million exps of pp's. And as I advance that number will rapidly increase. OA69 is ~400k exps and things continue to escalate rapidly from there. So the question is, are negative perks worth it? In particular is godless since it takes away from me the ability to do god quests and thus reduces the exps I earn in specific skills. Since my primary interest areas are harvest and alchemy this doesn't factor in very much... As the OA levels go up, PP's become more and more hard to come by. Thus their value increases. So is godless worth it? Have I made any mistakes in my summary above? One thing that occurs to me is that waiting to take godless until some fairly high OA level might be a good stratagy... Then you would get the benifit of the extra god related exps for a long time plus the extra eight pp's...

I'm up to three, two since the tweak. And I've found only one serpent stone in nearly 53 levels of harvesting. Based on that I figured they must be worth a lot of money when I found one around level 50. I was kind of depressed when I learned the truth.

Hmm, I get 10 exps for each FE, and FE is listed as base of five in the encyclopedia so I'd assumed based on my 11 rationality that alch exp bonus was rationality/2 rounded down...

Here's how I did the math to figure out how many PP's I had. I was told by somebody online that you get five "free" ones and it turns out this worked with some screwy math I had in figuring out how many pp's I had. Here's a hopefully accurate breakdown.... Basic Attributes (value, pp's spent) Ph 14 (10) Coord 20 (16) Reas 9 (5) Will 13 (9) Inst 4 (0) Vit 5 (1) ---------- 41 pp's spent Nexus Human 5 Animal 1 Veg 0 Ino 5 Art 4 Magic 1 ----------- 16 pp's spent Positive Perks MM 5 FRegen 3 --------------- 8 Unspent 3 ----------- 3 41+16+8+3 = 68 pp's I'm OA 55, so I have 13 extra PP's. These come from... Godless 8 Can't Daknce 5 Now for some whatifs... (Again, please correct me if I have any of these wrong) Spending those eight godless pp's on increasing my rationality four points would have for instance given me 4 extra exp's for every ess I made. In the case of fe this is nearly double. In the case of titanium bars it is about 2% extra. These extra exps are applied to all skills from what I understand though I'm unclear on the formulas for stuff other then alchemy. spending those eight pp's on MM and faast regen would give me the ability to choose my time for combat and regenerate MP & EP at three times the normal rate. As a alchemist/harvester MM also vastly enhances my ability to gain exps since I could go places and harvest things at much lower levels then I would have been able to do otherwise. In conjunction with the 120 harvests per game hour cap this is a big deal. There is no harvest or alch god. Given this fact anyone who's primary interest is in alch & harvest isn't losing much with godless, right? As always please correct me if I've made any mistakes. Currently I'm having trouble understanding the downsides of godless from the point of view of a harvest/alch/explorer character. And I'm not clear that its really a downside for other professions given the steadily increasing price of PP's at higher OA levels. Though PP's are highly variable in value depending on what they are spent on and what is available/desirable at the time. If you decide at OA90 that you really want to make potions after never having done so before and you have a zero vegital nexus... Well you're going to need a huge number of exps to get your nexus up to five.

That line was in response to my essentially being called a stupid newby with no right to an opinion. I was being sarcastic in an attempt to make a point. In any case I'd be more then happy to stop pointing fingers and just pretend this whole thing never happened.

I'm fine with anecdotal evidence that is backed up as much as possible with some sort of explaination as to why people think the anecdotal evidence is generally applicable. And for the record I don't care for the whole bag jumping concept. Or PK'ing for that matter since it doesn't interest me. But it does other people and I can live with that. I have the option not to go to PK maps afterall and the only time I do is when I'm either nakid or carrying nothing of value. The key point really is "Don't insult me.", especially as a substitute for actually defending your point of view. I don't like it, I won't stand for it. And if I insult anyone else then I expect to be called on it. I'm human, I make mistakes. I'll never claim otherwise. I've got some questions/theories about negative perks in general and the godless perk in particular that I plan on posting a thread on in the next day or so. I'm hoping to get some insights from people as to how the game works and the only way thats going to happen is if people stick to the topic and don't get into personal pissing matches.

Pardon me for having an opinion and not taking well to being personally attacked. And yes, you did personally attack me. Yes, its amazingly arrogant for me to have an opinion counter to yours and expect you to be able to actually support your point of view rather then denigrate me. What was I thinking? Let me summarize what you've pointed out with a famous old Saturday Night Live quote. "Jane, you ignorent slut." Thats pretty much the level of discourse I've been seeing from you. No, my problem is I don't argue like a six year old and I call other people on it when they do so. Nope. I said exactly what I meant. I'd love to debate with you. First you need to stop attacking me and actually say something I can respond to. So, the question is are you going to continue down this path or are you going to actually try to have a conversation with me? And rule number one is you are welcome to recount your experience in the game but you don't get to tell me I'm clueless because I haven't been around as long as you have. If you can't explain to me why I'm wrong without resorting to that then your argument can't be very strong.